rethinking patch management with GIT / topgit

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Tue, Mar 30 2010, Enrico Weigelt wrote:

>> > Yes, I push it to those who are naturally responsible.
>> > The term "distro" comes from distribution, not feature development.
>> > These are two fundamentally different issues.
>> 
>>         If you think that distributions do not develop, innovate, or
>>  are full participants in the free software community, you definition of
>>  distrbution does not match mine.
>
> Please differenciate between people and roles. If you're in the 
> role of a packager, your job is to create an automatically 
> installable package for your distro, out of your upstream - 
> nothing more, nothing less. Of course, you - as a person - can
> (and should) also take part in core development. But that's a
> completely different role, which implies different constraints
> and workflows.


        This is not how I define a Debian developer. We are not Debian
 Pacakgers -- and we do much more than just pull things into a
 tarball. Debian *DEVELOPERS* are just that -- a full member of the
 community, helping develop software, including features that might only
 be possible for Debian, because of polices that one may rely on in
 Debian.

        Trying to separate out hats at this stage is more work than is
 worth the effort. And thus I carry feature branches until upstream
 takes them, or, forever, if the feature takes advantage of Debian
 specific attributes.

        I suspect other distribution developers might fall into this
 camp. Turning Nelsons eye to such folks does not seem like a path to
 success.

        manoj
-- 
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only
one side of the case. God has written all the books.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>  
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